Stories by Brahmachari:

A Town Lost

Drunk-walks in Shillong rain through the waterlogged roads and pavements at night, running away from the crowd, traffic jams and newly acquired fascinations of shopping malls with plastic waterfalls, for Shillong is too cold for Subway anyway – and Dukan Ja and Sha would do to keep me warm and light my wet cigarettes; but when you search for your favourite tiny coffee corner, all you find is a big, fat retail giant monstrously chic for your taste – and the streets are filled with obnoxious tourists who come to dirty and buy, as if vacation meant shopping – so you run in the rain – and escape the filth that has taken over this dream – to forget, to remember friends you have lost and friends you have found to lose again – you run, you walk, you take a drag, try hard not to wet your smoke – and those pine trees, they eat memories – through time and rusted pages of alternate realities – and you walk through the night on streets that lead to sky, neatly stitched tin roofs, clotheslines, wooden houses that hang on the hills of Lumparing, oh Lumparing! and further up at Upper Shillong where Phyll still lives – as clouds dance like patterns in your Windows Media player, listening to random Bollywood songs that ooze out of a black and yellow Maruti 800 which used to strictly play classic rock, few years back, until reality TV came and danced over the crops of music that was this town. Maybe, only the direct diction of vernacular hip-hop revolution can clean this noise now.

Last taxi to Sohryngkham
(An elegy for Angeline Kharmalki) 

Memory is triangular
We burn to fight a cold, cold winter.
Night brings strange insects
Feeds her anxiety
Moths plan a mass suicide
Inside her mind. The windows are a blur.
The humming pine winds set the score.
The rain was always a part of the plan.
Until a coal truck slides and falls over
As she finally flies.

(and all our love-
hate games
unread letters
and scores
settled
in a flash)

Stories by Pariat:

Our Shiva

Let me claim you as the Veda did aeons ago,
Let me remind you of your previous life,
Pasan, my old uncle,
Whose shack was behind mother’s house,
Where you ate fish heads with local kyiad at night;
With every joke came a hint of malice;
We were always nervous laughing, wary of your curses,
Like Shiva, you danced one moment
Spat out venom the next.

During the day, you would prod about in the garden,
Harvesting taro and sweet potatoes.
You were always accompanied by our unceremonial dogs.

You bathed once a year before Christmas –
Upon my mother’s sharper insistence –
No-one called you deity but I know
You had something of the old gods;
Winter plants were nurtured by the silt of your meandering locks,
The mushroom in its underground prison festered joyfully again,
The wild rat smirked in its winter sleep within its earth womb,
Blossoms grew patient, waiting for the shot of spring:
It was all your doing, I know.

Look East

Look East but not if this highway brings middlemen and murder;
Look East but not for the sake of nation or Delhi;
Look East but not if this highway takes from you, your health;
Look East but not for the sake of anything but your village;
Look East but not if this highway brings dust and drunk driving;
Look East but not for the sake of companies or tycoons;
Look East but not if this highway takes from you, your rice fields;
If these should happen: look west, look south, look north,
Look anywhere but east.

In These Hills 

My people – ancient people – who remember nothing:
Who do you sing to now when the creeks are yellow?
Is it worth praying after the black stones are gone? 
Do trucks from Assam pledge bountiful harvest? 
Our sacred mountain is in a Bangla depot,
The site of our lovemaking is under construction, 
The orchards rot away, the grass is emboldened
Your known tact dies with your shell:
Now amnesia only, only wood fire,
Fruit supplanted by famine, pond by pyre.